Vijay Bankar

It stands to reason that you have already prioritised your HR activities for the coming year. Obviously, no one can predict what may happen in the year ahead. This is especially the case given the unprecedented pace at which inventions and innovations are improving the HR tech landscape. The ‘alphabet soup’ is getting new ingredients with every product release from tech companies—case in point: AI, ML, DL, LLMs, GenAI, RPA, Agentic AI, MCP, and so on. This will obviously impact the recipe of our HR strategy for this year. During the previous year, we have seen companies experimenting with AI pilot projects in several areas with varying degrees of success. Giving us immense insights into where we should and should not implement these new products. During 2025, we have also seen announcements from Google about adding AI agents to Google Workspace, and from Microsoft about adding agents to (Agent 365) Microsoft 365.    According to various HR tech analysts, we are mov...

  According to Gartner research , the most significant emerging HR technologies for 2023 are skills management (51%), learning experience platforms (41%), and internal talent marketplaces (32%). Skills-based HR initiatives seem to be the bellwether, and cognoscenti suggest that the talent marketplace fits the bill to jump on the bandwagon. As per Gloat's report , essentially, it's a gateway to skills-based strategies to thread the needle between skills and opportunities. A Gartner report prognosticates that by 2025, 30% of large companies will implement a talent marketplace for optimizing talent.  Implementing a talent marketplace offers a convenient option for companies of consequential size working from numerous locations to proffer internal opportunities (gigs, projects, assignments, etc.) to their employees. Concurrently it also facilitates employees to reskill and upskill themselves to stay ahead of the curve with felicitous mentoring and career pathways through the...

"whatever success we have had in maintaining our culture has been instrumental in Intel's success in surviving strategic inflection points." — Andrew Grove In an earlier blog article, we could not focus enough on the importance of culture and its impact on business. As stated earlier about the reinforcing loop, implementing employee listening strategy, and developing appropriate culture. If we have a suitable culture, it will facilitate the effective implementation of our employee listening strategy. Here we will focus on effectively defining and then creating the right culture. The right culture is an indispensable prerequisite for successfully implementing our organizational strategy. Hence it is essential to change our hidebound culture consonant with the developments in the external environment. It is not immutable, albeit we can create bespoke culture according to our strategic requirements. First, let us look at how Gartner defines organizational culture. ...

"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."  — Hubert Humphrey 😃😃 Jokes apart, continuous employee listening is gaining momentum due to the developments in the preceding three years. It is also an integral part of the people analytics function. We implement it for devising compelling employee experience. Like other initiatives, we took a leaf out of the marketing book and initiated a continuous employee listening strategy to enhance the employee engagement. The direct upshot of continuously receiving employee feedback is gaining instantaneous actionable insights to improve employee experience and engagement. While also facilitating lower turnover and enhancing productivity and performance. According to a Bain & Company survey, 80% of organizations are optimistic about utilizing employee engagement systems in 2023. Active listening and passive listening are the rudimentary components of continuous employee listening. (Bersin...